Napster of Puppets by Lance Walker (Ojet Records) With the recent developments regarding Napster and the perhaps imminent freezing of their free trading capabilities on the horizon, the questions continue to arrive, arise and inject themselves into our conversations, issues, and frontal lobes. Soon it could affect perhaps even the way we think out our recordings as we plan them. The most common question: will the MP3, the most revolutionary of squashed and portable sound, one day outrun our beloved records and CDs in the race to technological superiority and worldwide usage? Industry analysts will study the facts and developments and tides and changes within the industry from wav to wav, collecting and collected amongst themselves until the day takes them where they like the charts to read - but how realistic are their findings? Do they reflect the actual market for record sales? The perfect study would have to be those fast and heavy whipping boys of Napster themselves - Metallica. What more shining a horse's ass of the free-music movement than a band apparently far from capable of creating the once epic metal anthems they so convincingly sold us in the late 80s. I myself was no less than a disciple of the boys - Master of Puppets was a record any punk rocker could argue towards being worthy of placement next to Black Market Baby or The Adolescents, Minor Threat or the Necros. I went to war for the metal and I wasn't even a headbanger - I was a skinny, messy-headed homer from the side of town where you had to walk ten minutes to see your nearest neighbor. But I knew my shit. I knew my punk rock and I knew how to buy records. So Metallica gives us nearly a decade's worth of empty and gutless recordings - save a few gems on the black album of 1991 - and when their sales begin to plummet, they point their metal-glazed fingers towards Napster and the inherent evils so ever-present in free music trading. Never once factoring in the most obvious of reasons for their downfall: a complete and finite absence of angst. It all goes back to angst for those of us who grew up with it (rantings on contemporary metal and its shortcomings could provide for another article altogether) and to see Metallica carefully and seemingly methodically drain their music of anything vital or pure, we can only be bitter. Yet they place the blame for a half-decade of falling sales on a computer program created by a 17 year-old boy. Nevertheless, they set sail on an anti-Napster campaign, far and wide-reaching, only increasing the public's disdain for their current schtick. On the other side of the issue, it will be fascinating to see what direction Chuck D of Public Enemy takes with the issue. He has been a long-standing supporter of the free-music movement and even severed his contract with Sony a couple of years back to start his own label. "...you've got to come up with ways adapt to it, and make it work for everybody," he said in a recent interview with NME. While perhaps not enjoying quite the same wide-reaching success as Metallica, P.E. have long proven to be innovative minds with their eyes to the future, and progress as a whole. Chuck D has referred to Metallica's Lars Ulrich, the driving force behind their campaign, as "greedy and ridiculous." "Three years ago people thought I was mad. Two years ago I was sued. Last year I was seen as a parasite and within two years the majors will be talking to me as an equal." What percentage of money an artist should receive from profits is arbitrary, and it's a can of worms I don't really intend to open in this article. I am an artist myself and I should hope in that respect that in the same position, I would be getting paid my dues for my music as well. But isn't that the point, really? I mean, if records aren't worth anything to us, why would we buy them? After all, perhaps for the true record connoisseur - it's not what we will buy, but what we won't buy. The scenario is pure and easy and lives itself over and over again with all of us: dateline - the new record by my favorite band is coming out today - I'm heading down to the record exchange to pick it up. I called up there and they got it in already - 40 copies. Come get one. Stroll in, sweep it up off the rack: ah! There it is in my hands, a primed, pressed and fresh copy of my favorite band's newest contribution to rock and roll. Check out the cover art, look at the names of the new songs. Impatience - slap that bad boy on the counter and drop down ten or twelve hard-earned dollars. Hand me the bag and I'm in the driver's seat of my hatchback scorching the shrink-wrap off that bad boy - liner notes dripping with a billion or a dozen tasty bits of information - I am complete once again and I have (insert band) to thank for it. God I hope they tour for this album... So there it is - the record buyer's fetish. Must you have grown up amongst record shops, walls stocked with nice round slabs of flat fresh vinyl in 12-inch cardboard encasements to really and truly love and appreciate that fetish? Maybe so, and maybe one could argue that the younger generations will be most efficiently content with a belt-riding electronic buggy full of lifeless digital music files with no attached intensity or imagery, but I beg to differ. There is a certain personality given to recordings with everything that comes with them. A delicate gap for imagination between what you see and what you don't see regarding the artist and their printed gospel is all-important, but a speck of visual to stimulate that imagination towards the artist's own vision is priceless. So if you have ever felt a bit robbed when you bought a record and found no liner notes, no pictures, no anything other than a shell with a photograph and song titles, you will never cease purchasing records. And if you have ever walked into a record store like Charlie Bucket in the candy shop, ablaze and in awe of the sights on the wall, dropped down the bones for a twelve inch record and took a sniff of the fresh vinyl record inside once you broke through the shrink-wrap, you will never stop buying records. In closing I send out a subtle but strong word to those out there making records: make quality records, and we will have no reason to stop buying them. The mp3 is but a small corner of such a larger piece of art; one which can never truly replace that thrill which we as children and as adults and consumers get in that opportunity to see our vicarious emotions (music) as a physical, real and tangible product. After all, when was the last time you got excited about getting home plopping down on the couch, unwrapping and putting your brand new mp3 file on the turntable? Lance Walker Ojet Records (Chuck D quotes taken from Public Enemy's official site http://www.publicenemy.com and are from an interview with NME.) learn more about OJET Records at http://www.ojet.com